Police attendance to mental health incidents 625A/21
Request
Q1 – the number of police call outs for mental health/ self-harm/ suicide concerns or emergencies since January 2019, to now (15/04/2021), with a month-by-month breakdown;
Q2 – the exact nature of the call out (mental health concern/ suicide attempt etc.);
Q3 – the subsequent proceedings (A&E visit, mental health service referral, sectioning at a mental health facility, voluntary self-referral or otherwise etc.)
Q4 – whether the ambulance service was also present.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
Although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (attached file “attachment 625A_21). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
For Questions 1,2 and 4 please see the attached document “attachment 625A_21”. This has been split into three tabs – mental health, suicide and self-harm and the ambulance data is also detailed on each tab. For the ambulance data, we can say that an ambulance “received” the person and transported them to hospital.
Please note that some of the data can overlap, for example an incident may have a mental health and suicide maker, so in this case the data would be included in the mental health tab and the suicide tab on the attachment. To separate and identify these overlapping markers on each incident would exceed the cost for the purposes of the freedom of information act as there are thousands of records that would need to be individually assessed.
However, for Question 3 we have no information held as to what happened to that person then or which department they went to. I would suggest that you need to put a freedom of information request into the NHS / West Midlands Ambulance Service to retrieve that data.
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.